


Art

by orphan_account



Category: Discworld - Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Male Protagonist, POV Male Character, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Siblings, Vampires, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-25
Updated: 2008-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:34:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Otto joins the league.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Art

Otto never had a castle. His family had had a glorious mansion once. Otto barely remembered it – he'd been just 20 when it was lost. His first memory was of looking up, up, along the intricate reliefs of tortured, writhing bodies, all the way up to the top, where the wall ended and starlit skies began.

Already the Chrieks had lost most of their members to old age – which happens, even to vampires – and unusually clever vampire hunters. It takes a lot to kill a vampire so he stays dead, but there are ways. Now there were only four – and then, after a horrible night of fire and wood and liquid that burned and froze the flesh – there were only two.

Otto and his older sister – two young vampires alone, in the midst of a fortune. The tax collectors swooped in. They had vampires in their ranks now, old friends who now wore the black ribbon over their gleaming, brand-new evening dresses and suits, and open loathing in their eyes. It was the vampiric nature – ours, yours, mine, war. Otto wasn't one of them anymore, because he was poor, and because he still followed his nature.

Now Otto's suit was turning thread-bare, and Voracia was making her gowns out of old curtains. The mansion was long gone. Uberwald was long left behind. Only their accent carried the memory of the old country, their accent and the grandfather clock, carved from fine wood, with a pattern of roseless thorns around the face. They would have sold it already, but it was broken, and nobody wanted it. It dominated the little room. Street noises filtered in through the cracks in the window.

They didn't like vampires in this city either, this strange and noisy cesspool of stinking humanity. Otto had been turned down at every shop he'd applied for work in. In three, they had chased him out with pitchforks. How they had acquired pitchforks in a city miles away from any haystack Otto could not guess, but that was how it worked. They must have ordered them especially for people like Otto.

There was food, though. Always, and plenty. There was some forgetfulness, even for Otto, in this one addiction's satisfaction, the crunch of jugular beneath the tooth, the warmth of another life in his belly, even when the life was stinking, drunken, vile.

Voracia pricked her finger on her needle again, swore and cursed. Finally she threw her sewing down on the floor and stood up, stalking the room. 'Ve have to do somezing,' she cried out. 'Zis is no life for a vampire! Zis is no life for a lady!'

Otto said nothing. He pulled his arms up to himself, shoulders hunched, as unvampiric a pose as possible. He had never been a very good vampire.

Voracia had fallen silent, and contemplated the grandfather clock. She sighed. 'The League would help,' she said at last, helplessly. 'The League looks after its own.'

\---

Voracia kept her head up, pride and anger flashing in her eyes. Otto stood behind her, in the rain, as they waited before the grand, heavy doors of the house at Abattoirs Lane. They waited for fifteen minutes, until an upset Igor opened the door and welcomed them in.

Igors were not in the habit of being late. He was detained, Otto realised. They wouldn't let him open the door to us. Not until they'd made us stand in the rain. A spark of the same fury that lit his sister's eyes burned for a moment in Otto's chest, until it dimmed and disappeared, smothered by its futility. Otto was not an aggressive nature. His father had thought him unnatural.

Inside, there were very few candles, and none of them drippy. The rooms were lit brightly with oil lamps, and on the walls hung slogans such as "Not One Drop!" and images of groups of vampires, hung in cheap frames, but painted with supernatural precision. They were made to wait again, and Otto examined the pictures then. Even the vampire's eyelashes were painted in. The ones on a handsome older woman in a pink sweater were heavy, and the artist had captured a glimmer in them that drew Otto nearer. It was something he lacked, and it made him think of his father.

When they were finally admitted, it was by a vampire in a tweed suit. Voracia's hand closed on Otto's wrist and squeezed it with all the fury that she was keeping from her face. Otto steeled himself, and didn't wince. She was his sister. She was his whole family. He wasn't a very good vampire, and he would have suffered a great deal more, to ease Voracia's pain.

They put the two of them in two separate rooms in the cellar, not far apart, while they went cold bat.

For Otto, it was freezing, hunger, need. He cried silently at the cramping pain, at the loss. In his dreams, he saw his mother, made of blood, full of blood like a fresh human maid, beckoning, offering, with that curved fanged smile of hers, and Voracia's high cheekbones. In the dreams Otto would reach for her, and she'd turn into a monstrous black bird, big as the sky, full of stars. He'd wake up hungry and bereaved.

Behind the wall, Voracia screamed, and screamed, and screamed. The echoes brought them back to Otto stony and muffled and cold.

He wasn't sure how many days – or weeks – had passed. He wasn't sure what time of day it was, there in the deep dark. But he hadn't dreamed of his mother. He was hungry, still, but the urgency was gone. He could think; he could feel. The light from the chandelier outside his cell no longer seemed tinged with red.

He lay there for a good long while, on the thin palliasse, listening to the rats. Voracia had grown quiet. After an interminable time he could hear footsteps on the stairs, and then a quiet discussion, further away. An iron door opening. More conversation. Sounds he could not recognise: a scratch of straw on stone. He closed his eyes. He was tired to the bone. Time passed.

The clinking of keys, and the screech of the door. A lady stood in the doorway, framed in light that dyed her pink cardigan in the colours of sunset. She stood looking at him for a while, her eyes bare suggestions in the shadows of her face. Otto was too tired to speak.

She sat next to him on the palliasse, and touched his cheek. He could now see her face twist in a slight smile.

'Velcome back, Otto,' she said.

'Vere's Voracia?' he managed.

Her smile disappeared. 'Not everyvun lives through ze change. She knew zat.'

And then there was one.

\--

Voracia had been his only love, his only family. He closed his eyes and tried to think of her, but her face was already fading from his memory. There was a chasm inside him, in his chest, vast and hungry and full of regret, but something was flowing into it. It was being filled. To the brim, and beyond, leaking into his mind, into his thoughts, like fever.

No-one had told Otto about the replacement of one lust for another and yet, when they did, it made perfect sense. It explained the shape burned on his retina, pink and gold and white and black, the shape of a woman against torchlight, framed in the doorway, and the detailed play of shadow and light in a most beautiful display.

He was noticing similar things now, almost daily. Where before he'd seen a candle, he now saw the light it threw, and where before there was absence of sight, now there was a myriad forest of shadow and colour.

Otto had never been in love. He now felt that he knew what it must feel like.

He painted – he couldn't help it.

Voracia had been right – the League took care of its own. He had been set up in one of her house's rooms, and there was rumour that they were looking for somewhere more permanent for him. Otto had time to wonder vaguely what this meant – he had no money, and vampires were not known for adopting strangers into their families, fellow Ribboners or not. He expected he would have to find a way for himself somehow. He had little patience for these thought, though, being consumed by his new love, by his efforts. He'd eat rat and gladly wear rags if only they would keep him in paint.

He wasn't any good. He destroyed brushes as fast as canvases, broke every piece of chalk he put on paper, and no colour he tried to mix ever turned out anything like the splendour before him, painted by sun or moon or fire. At last, he dipped his fingers in paint, and scratched shapes and smudged colours desperately.

There was some progress then. Sweet stars, oh mother, there was that glimmer, that shape he was looking for. It was close to midnight, on a night of full moon, and there on the canvas was the gold of candlelight, the white of moonlight, the blue of shadow.

'Here,' a voice called behind him. He turned, and to his intoxicated eyes the shape behind him took some time to coalesce into a person. It was the lady in the pink cardigan, his indoors sunset, the angel of contrasts. She was smiling, and he recognised the glimmer in her eye, the hunger of a true vampire, but not the same blood-red tinge. 'I've brought you a present,' she said.

'Who are you?' he asked, taking without thinking the black box she had thrust into his hands.

'A shadow,' she said, putting a finger to her lips. 'Not officially here at all, you understand. Best not to mention me at all – I'll be gone by daytime, as it is. But look, here, Otto – look.'

Otto raised the thing to his eye-level.

'Push zis button here –' The lady proceeded to show him the mechanism, and then introduce him to the demon, and then, as morning began to creep in, Otto pushed the button for the first time, and the imp painted the sky, in minute detail, perfect in every respect; and the lady's hair caught the glimmer of the rising sun, and the imp painted that too, strands of radiance on a tiny piece of paper.

'Who are you?' Otto asked again in a whisper. The lady's eyes gleamed, and she whispered her name in his ear, kissing him on the cheek. Then she opened the window, driving stripes of shadow across the floor, and melted into the morning fog.

He had never been in love. Now he was.

But not with her.

He lifted the box, and captured the lines of black shadow behind the chair's legs.


End file.
